Friends with Priority

September 10, 2010 | Written by Lucie Zhang

The good thing about social media is that it makes you stay connected with your social network. The bad thing about social media is that it makes you stay connected with your social network. And by doing so, it makes you constantly reevaluate who is in your social network.

Going through my Facebook newsfeed can sometimes make me feel like I’m sifting through shifting friendship ranks in order to weed out the updates I care about from the ones I don’t: “she’s my BFFL, he was in my dorm sophomore year, she’s an acquaintance I studied abroad with, …wait, I have no idea who that is.”

As a news source, social media falls short by limiting our abilities to prioritize and categorize the floods of information that come from our “friends.” Recently, Google has offered a new tool to help us sort through the clutter by creating a Priority Inbox, which separates your email into 3 segments (Important, Starred, and Everything Else) and automatically sorts incoming, unread mail into either “Important” or “Everything Else” to a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. The creation of the Priority Inbox directly draws from recognition of a growing trend: as social media has caught on and our networks have expanded to include those from literally every aspect of our lives, our friends are also becoming, in a sense, a new breed of not-quite-spam. As we are prompted to share information with one another, often that sharing comes in the form of funny videos, silly links, enlightening articles, donation/favor requests, and other miscellaneous bits and pieces. It’s “important,” but not really. It’s just “everything else.”

Businesses and marketers alike have hit on the fact that friends influence their friends’ buying decisions to a remarkable degree, but the power of word-of-mouth really depends on the source. In fact, Advertising Age reported earlier this year that, as a result of the “friending” culture that has emerged, consumers are increasingly trusting their peer network less. According to Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer, only 25% of consumer believe their friends and peers are credible sources of information about a company, versus 45% in 2008.

As explained by David Berkowitz, director of emerging media at 360i, in Advertising Age, “When you’re seeing so much noise, it’s very easy to dismiss a lot of it, and that’s a problem marketing messages have had for a while now.”

“Facebook really exemplifies this with the live-feed and news-feed options,” he said. “If you use the live feed and have a few hundred friends, some kind of peer recommendation, whether it’s explicit or not, appears every couple of minutes and sometimes they come in a matter of seconds. If you’re seeing all of that come in, it can be overwhelming.”

Moreover, it can be downright annoying, prompting some to defriend particularly loquacious acquaintances. But for the most part, defriending (now an officially-recognized term by the New Oxford American Dictionary) carries a certain degree of stigma. “Emotionally, it can be the same as being dumped because it’s one-sided,” said Irene Levine, a psychiatry professor at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, in a recent article by The New York Times. “While the defriender may have been grappling with the decision to defriend for some time, it comes out of the blue for the person defriended.”

As The New York Times points out, there isn’t a very tactful way to tell someone you no longer want them in your social network. Sure, you can block a person’s updates from appearing on your newsfeed, but privacy concerns also come into play with who can and who cannot be “friends” with you. In the end, it all comes down to just how polite you really want to be about the fact that you’ve grown apart (or, in some cases, never really knew each other to begin with).

“If there’s one major flaw in social networking right now, it’s that it doesn’t really provide a nuanced way to defriend,” said Aram Sinnreich, a media professor at Rutgers. “The two ways are either to announce it to the world at large or to do it totally in stealth, so even the defriended person isn’t aware of it. Neither of those is a particularly socially positive approach to the situation.”

Thus, while the Internet can be devoid of many of the nuances of face-to-face interaction, it still has its own “netiquette.” In an interesting essay on the popular game Farmville, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, the assistant editor of digital, visual, and sound poetry at Anti- and instructor and student in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, argues that “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.” That is, people are playing Farmville not necessarily for the game itself but because they feel obliged to engage with their friends on Farmville.

He writes:

Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

By making the task of keeping in touch instantly achievable, has social media therefore heightened our sense of social obligation to our social network? Or, are Liszkiewicz’s arguments only a reflection of the symptom and not the cause, which is that we instinctively filter through the chaos of a hyper-connected world in order to pay the most attention to those with whom we truly share a connection? Arguably, this is what humans have done for ages — but social media now makes our subtle signals publicly obvious.

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